My Garden of Flowers

                                     After I retired from teaching, I went back to college to study Fine Art.  Having painted on my own during vacations and summers, I longed to take studio classes with the traditional academic training at our Hillsborough Community College.  After I completed several years at college, I kept painting on with more of a direction and confidence.

     I always loved Georgia O'Keeffe's wonderful abstract flower painting so I thought it was a good place to start.  I have painted many flowers.  Flowers for my Mom, my daughter, and friends.  I painted big ones and dainty ones in all colors, shapes and varieties. 

Here are a few of them.  My flowers were painted in honor of my mother who was a master gardener and whose name was Florence which means flower.

White Iris
oil     24x30    $450

This white iris was one of my first flower paintings.
I didn't want to copy Georgia but I wanted to paint in her style.   I felt that she was a little too symmetrical so  I started cropping flowers close in until I saw a beautiful abstract.  This painted is a perfect example of what I wanted to see.

My Magnolia, My Tree
oil     24x30
I took a photo of the Southern Magnolia tree in our front yard.  It had many blossoms but once again I did a lot cropping until I saw something that was rather abstract and caught my eye.  Magnolias are such gorgeous, large blossoms with petals that look like kid glove leather.  Since the flower was all white and the leaves were shiny dark green, I used the shadows to insert color to create interest.  The leaves helped with the directional flow of the composition.

Canna Tropicana
Oil     20x30     $300
Canna lilies are large showy plants  and Canna Tropicana are the showiest of all.  Both the large leaves and the flowers are very vibrant in shades of red, orange,magenta, violet and green.  They are such fun to paint.  I was offered a commission to paint a very large painting for a couple who had beautiful gardens surrounding their home.  I did this painting as a preliminary painting so they could see color that I would use for their large original.  Once again, I took many photos of their large display of Canna Tropicana.  I printed out the photos that I liked and cut them up and composed a large painting with an assemblage of the photos.  It is a very striking painting!

"Canna Tropicana"     50x60     oil

More flowers for my garden:

Tiger Lily     30x40     Oil

Orchids in the Evening
24x36    oil

Pink Rhapsody     40x30     oil

The First Blush of Spring     oil     24x24

Easter Lily     18x24     oil

Orchids for Kristy     28x40     oil

Lily Fandango     24x30      oil

Balet Des Fleure     72 by 48     oil

A Garden For Florence     48x48     oil

Creativity

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Adams

Three reasons why people are motivated to be creative:
1,  The need for novel, varied, and complex stimulation.

2. The need to communicate ideas and value

3.The need to solve problems. 

In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective. Among other things, you need to be able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives. Tests of creativity measure not only the number of alternatives that people can generate but the uniqueness of those alternatives. The ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur by chance; it is linked to other, more fundamental qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the enjoyment of things heretofore unknown. 

Creative people feel the need to create and are thrilled by new ideas.

Over the years I always needed to be making thing, sewing, knitting, crocheting, and needlepoint.  Nothing satisfied me for any length of time until I tried to paint.  Immediately I was hooked!  The possibilities were endless and I was stimulated by the need to get more skillful.  Someone gave me a box of pastels that they found while cleaning out a closet.  They suited my sense of color and light touch and I was in love!

These are some of my most creative work.

Up The Yellow Brick Road     18x24     pastel     NFS

This might be my favorite painting of my own work.  Sadly I sold it and I miss it.  Friends tell me, "Just paint it again!"  That is easier said than done.   I was in a totally creative mood,  it was painted in a period of about an hour and I never changed a stroke or color.  My totally creative moods don't happen often enough but when they do occur wonderful things happen.  When the rest of the paintings on this post were painted when I was in the same kind of mood.









Castles in The Sky     Pastel     18x24     $650
I have always been a daydreamer who loved fairytales.  I guess that is what castles in the sky are, fairy tales.  I loved stories about princesses and princes.  Guess I was a hopeless Romantic.  Some people might call them "pipe dreams."  I painted this while listening Rachmaninoff's Piano Concertos.  Such heavenly music!
It really does take me away.

Symphony to an Unruly Child     12x18    pastel
I am a great fan of the famous woman abstract expressionistJoan Mitchell, of the  50's school of Abstract Expressionists, which included such famous artists, as Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, and Willem DeKooning to name just a few.  I always felt a kinship with Joan partly because she was a woman competing in a man's world but also because she painted with music as I do.  I love her the passion and excitement she conveys in her work.  The use of strong color that captures the eye and doesn't let go.
I painted this abstract piece while listening to Rachmaninov.  My little grandson, Luke, who was a very active toddler at the I was painting this was my muse for the energy I generated.  At that time, he like nothing better than slouching paint around on paper with anything he could get his hands on.  Being very headstrong, there was no stopping him.  I loved watching him as long as I didn't have to clean up after him.  
I was thrilled when this pastel was juried into the Pastel Society of America's 40th Annual Exhibition, "Enduring Brilliance," at the National Art Club in New York.  What a tremendous honor!

The Gordian Knot

The Gordian Knot

An exceedingly complicated problem or deadlock.

Visual Artists also have to deal with solutions to problems that have to be solve by Critical Thinking.  Some people might call it "thinking outside the box."  The Gordian Knot is an example of the bold, "Out of the Box" thinking of Alexander the Great.

An imaginary rendition of what the Gordian  Knot may have looked like.

This Neo-Classical painting depicts Alexander the Great cutting the knot on the ox cart with his sword.

Painting by Fedele Fischetti  (Naples, 30 March 1732 – Naples, c.1792)^[1] was an Italian painter of the Neoclassical period.

The Gordian Knot is a legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (disentangling an "impossible" knot) solved easily by cheating or "thinking outside the box" ("cutting the Gordian knot"):
Thinking outside the box (also thinking out of the box is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking.

Some my own "Out Of the Box" paintings.   I hope you enjoy them.

Bach Out of the Box    18x24     $650 framed

Wolfgang"s Complexities      18x24      pastel       $650 framed 

 +shipping (not included)

Dancing Around Boxes with Bach     16X20        pastel     $650 framed  
+shipping (not included)

                                                         

Steppin Out     18x24       pastel     $650 framed+shipping (not included)

My "Out of the Box" paintings  were painted with Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart both of whom were very original and innovative composers in their day.  Like so many creative and original artists, their work was not accepted in their own time and they died penniless.

Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box

The Myth

According to Greek legend, the first woman, Pandora, was actually sent as a curse to Zeus' men and was given a present upon her marriage. The present was a box that she was told never to open. Needless to say her curiosity got the better of her (like eating forbidden fruit) and she unleashed eight demons unto the world. The first seven being the seven deadly sins, and the last, which she managed to capture, was hope.


Today, much like christianity's idea of biting forbidden fruit, opening pandora's box refers to getting into a situation over which one has very little control over.

"Pandora" as seen in the Louvre  by Pierre Loison

Inside Pandora's Box

"Pandora Revisited"
What happened when Pandora opened the box.

                                          Pandora opening her box by James Gillray

For this Series of Abstract Expressionistic paintings in pastel, I chose the Greek Myth about Pandora and her Box.  The story seems to be appropiate given the state of world today.  Food for thought at least.  I think I will add two more paintings to this  series and I will post them all together when I have them done.  I hope you have enjoyed the story so far.:-)  Please join the blog if you like it.

Mom's Spring Gardens

I believe this to be very true, especially for me.

                                     "Memories of Mom's Spring Garden Reaching toward the Sun"
As usual, I  painted these 2 pastels with Classical Music.  I used Bach and Stravinsky to inspire the calligraphy marks at the bottom.  The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky worked perfectly to portray the strength of the tulips forcing their way through the cold soil.
My mother planted many of bulbs every fall.  Hyacinth , tulips of all colors and sizes standing tall to be admired.  Mother never cut these for the house but left them in the garden to be admired by all.

"Oh, The Awesomeness of Yellow Daffodils"

I wanted to paint Spring Abstract Expressionist Paintings in memory of my mother's beautiful gardens coming alive in the early spring.  Through the last bit of snow the deep violet crocus push their way out of partially frozen ground to await the arrival of the glorious yellow daffodils growing and opening almost overnight to look up to the warming Sun.  Bach's concertos worked beautifully to show the strength of the tiny crocus force as they forced their way up to the light.

Award Winning painting, "Meghan's Place"     pastel on Multimedia Artboard     16x20    framed
$450 + shipping

My Award winning painting "Megahn's Place"  is a 11 x 14 pastel on Multimedia Artboard.

I created  this painting from a photo of foliage sent to me from a friend, Meghan Seigner-Sullivan.  It is her backyard this past Fall in Portland, Oregon.  I was complaining to her about missing the beautiful fall foliage that I used to see in my childhood home,  Westchester County, New York.  We don't have any beautiful Fall colors to speak of here in Florida so I always used my memories of the hues of the fall New York.  Meghan sent this wonderful photo.  I painted a small version for her and sent it to her for Christmas.

I know that my painting doesn't look anything like Meghan's photo but I got my inspiration from her photo.  That is where music, imagination, and an artist's eye comes in.  I always listen to Classical music when I paint.  it seems to be the key that opens the door to my right brain, the seat of my imagination.  With my ear, hands, and eyes working in harmony an abstracted version of the photo results.

The Judge's Statement from the exhibition:  "Understate and technically accomplished use of pastel; this artist's subtle composition shifts between abstraction and illusion, jewel like color."

I like that!  :-)

The Musical Painter

 Mary Curran at North Tampa Arts League with her Award winning painting,  Meghan's Place.